The ultimate goal of physics is to break things down until we discover the simplest, most basic rules that govern the universe.
The goals of biology do not lead down what you call the “indirect route.” As you state, Biology abstracts away the low-level physics and tries to understand the extremely complicated interactions that take place at a higher level.
Biology attempts to classify and understand all of the species, their systems, their subsystems, their biochemistry, and their interspecies and environmental interactions. The possible sum total of biological knowledge is an essentially limitless dataset, what I might call the “Almanac of Life.”
I’m not sure quite where you think we disagree. I don’t see anything in our two posts that’s contradictory—unless you find the use of the word “Almanac” disparaging to biologists? I hope it’s clear that it wasn’t a literal use—biology clearly isn’t a yearly book of tabular data, so perhaps the simile is inapt.
The way you put it does seem to disparage biologists, yes. The biologists are doing work that is qualitatively different from what physicists do, and that produces results the physicists never will (without the aforementioned thousand tons of computronium, at least). In a very real sense, biologists are exploring an entirely different ideaspace from the one the physicists live in. No amount of investigation into physics in isolation would have given us the theory of evolution, for instance.
And weirdly, I’m not a biologist; I’m an apprentice physicist. I still recognize that they’re doing something I’m not, rather than something that I might get around to by just doing enough physics to make their results obvious.
The ultimate goal of physics is to break things down until we discover the simplest, most basic rules that govern the universe.
The goals of biology do not lead down what you call the “indirect route.” As you state, Biology abstracts away the low-level physics and tries to understand the extremely complicated interactions that take place at a higher level.
Biology attempts to classify and understand all of the species, their systems, their subsystems, their biochemistry, and their interspecies and environmental interactions. The possible sum total of biological knowledge is an essentially limitless dataset, what I might call the “Almanac of Life.”
I’m not sure quite where you think we disagree. I don’t see anything in our two posts that’s contradictory—unless you find the use of the word “Almanac” disparaging to biologists? I hope it’s clear that it wasn’t a literal use—biology clearly isn’t a yearly book of tabular data, so perhaps the simile is inapt.
The way you put it does seem to disparage biologists, yes. The biologists are doing work that is qualitatively different from what physicists do, and that produces results the physicists never will (without the aforementioned thousand tons of computronium, at least). In a very real sense, biologists are exploring an entirely different ideaspace from the one the physicists live in. No amount of investigation into physics in isolation would have given us the theory of evolution, for instance.
And weirdly, I’m not a biologist; I’m an apprentice physicist. I still recognize that they’re doing something I’m not, rather than something that I might get around to by just doing enough physics to make their results obvious.